bloXmoveNG: market traction AMA
Summary of bloXmove AMA, August 21st, 2023
1. Why did Bloxmove choose Nigeria?
A lot of questions come up on this point, so we feel it is important to emphasize the potential of the country.
In general: truly disruptive technologies tend to have a hard time in mature, heavily regulated markets. Incumbents defend their turf and society in general is more bureaucratic than “younger”, emerging markets. Disruptive technologies tends to create “grey” situations: because the technology is so new, there is often no precedent and no existing path to follow. This creates “grey” situations: it’s not been done before and no obvious way to book, document or audit is available.
Mature markets tend to discourage such situations and in general follow the conservative principle of:
“if it’s not allowed, better don’t try it”.
Compliance officers as well as data privacy and other regulating instances will then tend to discourage or even prevent such situations.
Emerging markets on the other hand tend to follow the rule:
“if it’s not forbidden, give it a try.”
Coming to specific advantages the Nigerian market offers:
- Nigeria is Africa’s biggest economy,
- It has a huge market in mobility with no public transport incumbents to speak of.
- It presents a typical “leap-frogging” opportunity, where a whole generation of technology which was created in other places and prevents the latest tech from gaining a foothold, is “leap-frogged” taking the whole market straight to the next generation of technology.
- Nigeria is also English-speaking (English being one of four official languages) and has a Common Law (i.e. same background as UK, US, Singapore and Ireland) legal framework where business is concerned.
- It is also the world’s most crypto-friendly country and the whole web3 and crypto space is full of young, passionate Nigerians leaving their mark on the community — among them the bloXmove community which has had active Nigerian community members from day 1.
2. Summary of Status Quo
The main topic of today’s AMA is the result of
our “traction sprint” which ran from July 15th to August 15th, 2023.
To recapitulate:
- June 1st we went live with internal pilot
- June 15th we launched the bloXmoveNG passenger and driver apps on AppStore and GooglePlay
- The month between June 15th and July 15th was used to gather feedback on how to go from pilot-level to ready for market.
- The major update on the app side was that we eliminated the dependency on an external wallet (Valora or MetaMask) by writing our own wallet logic into the app.
bloXmoveNG apps are now fully native web3 apps, with built-in wallets!
From here on forward it’s all about traction, i.e. market penetration.
As will be seen from the results shown below: we have achieved considerable momentum — starting August 1st. Since then we have seen a rapid increase of registered drivers and passengers and closely related app downloads.
3. Collaboration with independent driver union
bloXmove has always positioned its technology as enabling scaling without aggregation, i.e. scaling without the negative effects hyper aggregators, such as UBER and BOLT, bring to market fairness.
Our motto has been for a while
“STOP AGGREGATING — START COLLABORATING”
The situation on the ground in Nigeria has now provided massive positive reinforcement for this:
Due to the abusive business practices of the big hyperaggregators, mainly BOLT, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of drivers have come together to form a union.
This union’s main goal is to provide a balance against market domination and abusive practices by the hyperaggregators, such as 20–30% commission off drivers’ revenue as well as an arbitration practice that is tilted heavily against drivers.
We are in close negotiating phases (MoU: Memorandum of Understanding pending) both with the National Board as well as the Jos chapter of this union.
We already work with them operationally and it is through this collaboration that we have managed to onboard a major chunk of our new drivers.
We are running a promotional incentive for the drivers ( 10 litres fuel incentive for every driver that onboarded on the app) and this is going very well with over 300 drivers signed up on the app from promotional engagement. We have had 2 congresses in Jos between July 31st and August 11. Our engagement with this Union will be ongoing and we are close to completion on an ambassador deal with the major stakeholders.
This collaboration promises to be concluded soon and would then take bloXmove to where we always wanted to be:
In a cooperation with drivers to provide an e-hailing app which is designed:
for drivers, by drivers and with drivers.
Traction Summary
We now present a few numbers. These numbers are for a very short period (15 days between August 1st, when momentum started until August 15th when we took our snapshot).
In order to keep the community informed, we will continue to publish traction reports every 6 weeks; next report due end of September, 2023.
In sum: Habemus Momentum! — We got momentum!
Drivers
Passengers
Our Marketing Approach
As a new product just penetrating the market, we focus our efforts on trackable marketing activities. During the just concluded sprint, we embarked on a combination of on-the-ground and online sales and marketing activities. As already mentioned, we created a collaboration with a union of drivers who acted as ambassadors and pushed our incentives to attract drivers and passengers. This was kicked off by a small meet-up event organised for drivers where they got merch items after successfully onboarding on the driver app.
We then kick-started online campaigns targeted at both drivers and passengers to help boost momentum. The online campaigns were social media ads on our facebook and Instagram accounts. It was also backed with a demographically positioned Google display ad campaign to reach our target audience.
How do we intend to incentivise going forward, and what are our future marketing plans?
Going forward, we will be working based on the analytics we got from the previous campaign. These analytics have convinced us that on-ground marketing activities need to be more intensified with traditional marketing efforts, which include, radio jingles, live interviews or billboard adverts. This will keep us in the minds of acquired customers and those still at the decision-making stage.
We also hope to include some influencer marketing by working with important personalities and public figures to improve our credibility. And of course, social media marketing activities will also be extensive and backed with push-up notifications, and email marketing to both drivers and riders.
What messaging do you use to set yourself apart from competitors?
For the drivers’ app, we preach about our 5% commission benefit, which gives us a good chance, unlike our competitors, who take about 20% commission.
Then, for the passengers, we ensure that they know that riding with bloXmoveNG means sticking to the agreed fare. There are no unexpected increase in ride fares due to long hours in traffic. Also, our ride fares are more affordable than competitors.
4. BLXM Utility on bloXmoveNG : Presently, we are using “shadow Naira” on the bloXmoveNG app. shadow Naira are internal ERC20 tokens, which are minted (created) and burnt (destroyed) in direct reaction to incoming (mint shadow Naira) )and outgoing (burn shadow Naira) payments in real Naira coming from our Payment Service Provider (PSP).
We are currently finalising development on our multi-token platform (MTP). Once this is deployed, incoming shadow Naira will be automatically exchanged to BLXM to pay for transactions.
In this way, we killed two birds with one stone:
- reduce friction for customers, who can simply use existing web2 payment methods.
- activate utility for BLXM, by using incoming revenue to exchange for BLXM under the hood.
Going forward, we will activate burning of BLXM by the MTP.
The above should be fully activated before October this year.
In addition, we will explore options to see where and how we can activate BLXM as a front-end utility token as well.
